Junzhe Hu

PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

About

I am a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-advised by Prof. Kevin Chen and Prof. Raphael Zufferey, and collaborating with Prof. Zachary Manchester on constrained optimal control and lightweight optimization-based controllers for robotic systems. Previously, I received my M.S. in Robotics from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, where I was co-advised by Prof. Carmel Majidi and Prof. Zachary Manchester.

My research centers on embodied intelligence for robotic systems operating in complex environments. As a full-stack roboticist, I believe robust autonomy requires the co-design of hardware, models, controllers, and learning algorithms.

News

  • 2026.07Our RSS 2026 paper Realizing Robotic Swimming with Unified Fluid–Robot Multiphysics was selected as an Outstanding Paper Award finalist.
  • 2026.04Paper on Strongly-Coupled Fluid–Robot Multiphysics accepted at RSS 2026!
  • 2026.06Our paper Programmable online stiffness modulation for optimized aquatic locomotion was published in npj Robotics.
  • 2025.10Two workshop papers presented at CoRL 2025 — SwimGym and Unified Multiphysics.
  • 2025.07Paper on Aerial-Aquatic Robot accepted at IROS 2025 (Oral).
  • 2025.06Workshop paper on Unified Multiphysics Framework presented at ICRA 2025 Workshop.
  • 2025.05Paper on RepMatch under review at WACV 2026.
  • 2024.08Joined CMU Robotics Institute as a graduate research assistant.
  • 2024.05Awarded Best Capstone Project (1 / 130).
  • 2023.11Awarded Chinese National Scholarship (top 0.8%).
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Selected Publications

RSS 2026 — Unified Fluid-Robot Multiphysics
Realizing Robotic Swimming with Unified Fluid–Robot Multiphysics RSS 2026 Outstanding Paper Award Finalist
J. Hu*, J. H. Lee*, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026
Paper
npj Robotics — Programmable online stiffness modulation
Programmable online stiffness modulation for optimized aquatic locomotion Published
J. Hu, J. Lee, T. Wu, G. Sue, J. Liao, Z. Erickson, Z. Manchester, C. Majidi
npj Robotics, 2026
Paper
Passive swimming robot in vortex-induced propulsion experiment
Vortex-Induced Propulsion in Upstream Robotic Swimming Under Review
J. H. Lee*, J. Hu*, S. Kazi, M. Luhar, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
PNAS (Under Review)
RepMatch for semi-supervised medical image segmentation
RepMatch: Agreement-Guided Representation Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Under Review
Y. Wen, J. Hu, E. Roussinova, M. Bouri
WACV, 2026
Paper